Let’s dispense with the preamble. We’re talking, after all,
about the film adaptation of Cormac Macarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, a novel that I reviewed several
months earlier in this blog. Given that we are talking about two distinct art
forms, and that each relies on a vocabulary of techniques that are distinct, we
can start from the beginning with an acknowledgement that liberties will be
taken. Such is always the case with any kind of adaptation, and all the more so
when bringing a literary work to the big screen. It may very well be that there
are critics who are predisposed to find an adaptation unworthy of the original
work, asserting as they do a purist’s point of view that I can’t help but find
presumptuous. It is very much possible that an adaptation may actually
invigorate and improve upon the original work, and I can quite honestly draw
attention to two films that provided a much more esthetically pleasing
experience for me: Bladerunner, the
film adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and 2001:
A Space Odyssey, based upon a short story by Arthur C. Clarke.
To begin with, I can be blunt and say that the movie
adaptation of The Road has a certain
hypnotic quality. It reflects the tone of the original, but and conveys this
with visual imagery and with sounds as well as sequences that convey the
enormity of the collapse envisioned in the novel. The cause of this collapse is
not revealed, and wouldn’t in any way have contributed to the story, but it is
suggested in a sequence towards the beginning of the film that involves
recurring dream sequences. This is necessary, perhaps, to provide a contrast
and to adequately gauge the personal loss of this character, the father who is
guiding his son on a desperate journey to the coast.
In terms of sequences and the interspersing of scenes, the
movie takes pains to evoke an idyllic past that seems to torment the character.
We have no similar sequences for the son, only for the father, who is growing
more and more desperate as he is overcome by hunger, by coughing fits and by a
sense that his son is perhaps much too vulnerable. We see scenes that are relayed
as moments of peril, in which any other encounter with another human being
represents danger to them both. This is very much a paranoid state of mind, and
it is to the credit of the film that we see that the father, who is at the
center of the film, seems to have lost faith in anything approaching a viable
and cohesive society. It is his son who preoccupies him, and the fate he fears
will befall him once he dies.
There are moments of suspense, and macabre encounters along
this voyage. The slow and trudging journey along the road (and one can’t help
but ask, if other human beings are so dangerous, why expose themselves by
traveling along this selfsame road, filled as it is with endless reminders of
other failed journeys, of cars that have crashed into each other, cars that are
arrayed like crime scene sketches?) is interspersed with moments of sheer
panic. There is very little moral ambiguity, and instead, the colors of this
film, the persistent of a gloom that is both oppressive as well as soporific,
convey in a real sense the dilemma. They are isolated, and the father is in
need of illumination. He is as much lost as his son, an earnest boy who seems
maybe too innocent for his own good in such a world.
The pacing of the film matches that evident in the book. It
is a slow slog through the countryside, and it seems as if they will never
reach refuge. The dialogue is, as well, muted, with the father mouthing
meaningless platitudes to try to comfort a son who questions him more and more
as the journey proceeds. What could possibly lie on the coast? What hope can
they possibly find when it is apparent that there is no longer a moral
underpinning for humanity? It is all too common for survivors to eat other
survivors, for otherwise, there is no food, and the pickings are very, very
scarce.
The sequence of episodes seems at times a little
abbreviated. They proceed like flashes, perhaps suggesting moments of lucidity
during what is otherwise an unconscious struggle to keep moving and to avoid
detection. The movie omits the sequence with the pregnant woman who loses her
baby, one that would seem to presage what will happen to the father as well.
But the family makes an appearance in the end.
Part of what I found so entrancing about the film were the
grand visuals of destruction and decay. There is a certain majesty in these
scenes, with empty buildings and vast bridges deserted, silent, and lonely. It
was an accelerated decay, but these scenes have a power that reminds me of
similar sequences in other dystopian works. I am thinking, for example, of the
dramatic scene with the grand and mysterious buildings that is encountered by
the Time Traveller in H.G. Wells’ novel, or the description of vast California
cities beset by fairs and lights that are slowly winking out, in the novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. These
scenes were only suggested, if at all, in the novel, pointing once again to the
possibilities offered by cinema.
The desperation and weariness of the characters is conveyed
adequately by the actors, especially, by Viggo Mortensen, who projects an
almost feral intensity in moments of danger, but who is otherwise muted. There
is no room for snappy dialogue in a movie such as this. Instead, we have prose
that sounds at times sententious, but is mostly elemental, with a poetic
intensity. I imagine that most of the time the father and son do not talk very
much. They are both weighed by weariness, sadness, and the only sustaining
fiction that the father is able to provide for the son, that they are the “good
guys” who will find a way to overcome obstacles and will survive. Don’t we all
need such fictions at times?
What does the road signify? It has to symbolize something,
does it not? I would hesitate to say the obvious, but by virtue of the fact
that the movie, as well as the novel, are constructed by these notions that
shelter is not to be found, not in abandoned cars, not in seemingly abandoned
houses (one of which houses a horrifying discovery, a collection of mutilated
and tortured humans who are used as food), and not in hidden shelters that are
subject to discovery. Shelter is not found under waterfalls either, nor in the
wilderness, nor even by the side of a road, hunched as they are under a tarpaulin
to keep dry under the rain. The possibility of shelter is related to the
possibility of finding stability, of not having to move, and what we have is
instead a world in which terrifying tremors split the landscape apart, tremors
the likes of which have never been seen before. No, the road is survival, but
it is also a way of purging themselves so that, for example, the child becomes
much more saintly than could have been imagined in such a world. It is, then, a
theology.
In the end, the movie is haunting but it seems to be
compressed. It is a function, of course, of the medium, and the move is
relatively short, lasting approximately one hour and forty minutes. The final
sequence represents a culmination that was, at once, irresistible, but is also
more hopeful that we could have been led to believe. That is takes place next
to the ocean, that mirror of human identity, that offers an opportunity for
rechristening, lends itself to the idea of a theology. There is even an
allusion to faith, for the child is asked to trust the man who offers to take
him in at the end. I would assert, however, that perhaps this final scene is
nothing more than a final conceit. The overpowering gloom and despair of this
road would certainly seem not to promise the possibility of deliverance in the
end. The fact that there is a beetle, and that a flock of birds is seen, seem
to be an element of fantasy. It would be all the more logical of the child had
shot himself after losing his father, and that this final scene was a final
comforting illusion as he prepared to end his journey.
But we need to have faith, is it not so?
Copyrights ORomero 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment